Is Toyota heading for a Nike style esteem crash?

By: Monika Evers

In the 90's Nike felt the sway of public opinion turn against them for using slave labour to make their shoes. Toyota may have just as big a esteem crash looming, as information comes to light that toyota executives had reports of accelerators sticking in some of their cars, up to seven months ago, but chose not to treat it seriously.

Manufacturing cars is quite a complicated business. We can all understand the need to recall of a part here and there. We can even feel quite loved when we take our car in for a service, only to find out there is a free replacement part waiting for us, because the manufacturer believes that the one in our vehicle is not quite up to their standard of care.

It is an entirely different prospect however, to discover through the media, that the manufacturer of your car knew of a dangerous fault, one that could possibly endanger your life and the lives of those travelling with you, and decide not to do or say anything about it to you. That is a betrayal of trust and that is the kind of reputation damage Toyota is currently fighting.

When the US committee for Energy and Commerce asked Toyota to explain when they began investigating the issue of the sticking accelerators, they disclosed to the committee that they knew seven months earlier that there was a problem. They had received over eleven reports from both the UK and Ireland about sticking accelerators, but had chosen to consider them as isolated examples. When the same issues started appearing in the US the Obama administration decided to get involved.

Now Toyota is at the forefront of one of the biggest recalls in motor manufacturing history. 26,000 cars from Ireland, 1.8 million from UK and Europe, plus another 2.6 million from the US and that is just one side of the globe.

The repercussion for Toyota are already being felt with sales figures reported by the company to have dropped 23% below January targets.

Certainly the recall by Toyota has been thorough and swift inspecting all cars from 2005 onwards. The question is, will it be strong enough to sway the public into believing that the company did really care all along but simply got it wrong?

The one thing that can be said is that it has certainly taken the apparent oversight firmly on the chin. There has been no cover ups, no shredding of the reports before talking to the authorities, no shirking from their global responsibility.

However, “Oh what a feeling”, does seem to have lost a bit of its innocent lustre, at least for now.

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